The operator is delivering connectivity across Europe for the terrestrial route, which went live last month and claims to offer the lowest latency between China and Europe.
Renzo Ravaglia, EVP of service provider at Interoute, told Capacity that the company plans to roll out its full service portfolio in Russia next year, including its Virtual Data Centre offering.
“Our presence as a service provider in Russia is already significant. We are now addressing the enterprise market, where we are seeing significant demand from enterprise customers that need connectivity in Europe,” he said.
“I think there is good potential for our VDC offering from Russian customers and we see a lot of potential in the market there.”
Ravaglia believes the launch of DREAM is helping to establish Russia as a major transit market. With PoPs across Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, Slovakia, Austria and Germany, the route is expected to act as a valuable alternative for traffic between Europe and Asia.
Ravaglia confirmed that the operator had already received high levels of interest from customers on the route, which is also widely expected to help drive down transit prices in Russia.
“I think that in the last year, there have been significant changes in pricing to and from Russia. They’re not yet at a European level, but compared to three or four years ago, they are significantly less,” he said.
“I think DREAM will continue to create alternative and cheaper solutions for connections between Europe and Asia.”
Last month, MegaFon shared with Capacity that it is targeting a 20% share in terrestrial Europe- Asia bandwidth going through Russia for the first stage of the DREAM project.
According to the company, the initial capacity for the route between Frankfurt in Germany and Zharkent in Kazakhstan is approximately 100Gbps, with a potential upgrade of up to 8Tbps.
The DREAM project strengthens a long-term partnership between Russian carrier MegaFon and Kazakhtelecom, and it is expected to further provide resiliency and redundancy for connections between the two markets.
“We hope that our joint activities with Kazakhtelecom for this project will lead to further projects in the future,” said Alexander Teremetsky, carrier business director at MegaFon. “We would like to establish further commercial activities with the Kazakh operator in the fields of IP transit, lease-lines and perhaps voice interconnections.”
